At this time of year you probably can’t help but be bombarded with people asking what are your goals for next year?

And it can be a little bit overwhelming. So regardless of whether you are planning on setting some business or career goals for next year, or whether you are thinking about personal goals and New Year’s resolutions, I wanted to take a little bit of the pressure off and give

you a couple of insights that might help you make those goals stick.

Are you getting in your own way?

So first up one of the things that comes across my coaching practice regularly are people who are trying to achieve a goal but for some reason they just keep getting in their own way. It’s really common and it can be quite difficult to figure out for yourself.

One of the reasons behind this is that if we don’t create goals that are aligned to our core values, (those things that are most important to us as people), then we can run out of steam.

If we’re doing something because we feel we should be doing it, rather than because we have a real burning desire to do it and lots of reasons why we want to do it, we can run out of steam and it can seem like we’re trying to climb a mountain.

What are your core values, really?

I have very few non-negotiables in my coaching but one of the absolute non-negotiables that I have is that with every client I do a Values Exercise with them so that I can find out really what are their core values and what’s most important to them.

And we do that before we even talk about setting goals so that’s the first thing I want to share with you – really discover what are your most important core values and don’t think that you know.

I would encourage you to go through an exercise on working out what are your most important values because sometimes they shift, sometimes we carry values with us through our life that are being given to us by our parents or other influencers that just don’t fit anymore.

Explore your core values and if you’re having trouble with that then I offer a one off Clarity Session that takes you through my values process and you can find that on www.lorrainehamilton.net.

What next?

I want you to think about which is the value that you want to put some focus on. Now I’ve got a number of layers of prioritization that I do with my clients to identify which value is the one that has the greatest opportunity, but just find the one that you think, actually yeah I want to have a bit more of THAT in my life next year.

Next I want you to do a bit of a brain dump. This is a great exercise. I use it in project management, I use it with clients, I use it in goal-setting and it really is an amazing tool to help you find out where to start.

For example you may have a goal for health next year, maybe health is an area that you want to put some focus on. But where do you start?

What are the actual goals that you’re going to set so that then you can design the actions that are going to get you there?

Sometimes that can be one of the hardest things.

STOP, START, CONTINUE

This tool is really handy – it’s called STOP START CONTINUE and it is really simple.

What do you need to STOP doing in order to improve your health next year?

What do you need to START doing to improve your health next year?

And what do you need to CONTINUE doing to improve your health next year?

It’s that simple and from that exercise a couple of things will come out. In the STOP and START columns you’re gonna have some real good fodder for goals to set. Because all of those things that you come up with are potentially a goal that is connected to your health value.

And in the CONTINUE column?

Well that’s stuff that you can congratulate yourself on for doing already, because so often we don’t actually take time to take stock of celebrating our successes and what we’re already doing.

If you take those little steps and apply them to your business, career or your personal goals for next year then they’re much more likely to stick and you’re much more likely to see them through past February.

Do an exercise on exploring what your core values are and if you’re struggling with that then check out www.lorrainehamilton.net where you’ll find my one off Clarity Session where I can help you with that.

Then identify one of the values that you want to work on and run it through STOP START CONTINUE to find some goals to set and some actions that are going to lead you there.

I’m looking forward to seeing you soar in 2018.

And to find out more about working with Lorraine on a one-to-one basis, please click below.

One thing I like to do is make celebration cakes. For me it’s not so much about the baking and recipes, it’s ALL about the decoration.

I call it ‘Cake Construction’.

I am an absolute self-taught amateur, and whilst I receive many compliments on my cakes, I tend to brush them off because all I can see are the flaws.

Have a look at the photos below and tell me what you see.

I can bet that it’s not what I see.

I see where the lines aren’t 100% straight, where there are lumps in the icing, where the consistency of the modelling chocolate wasn’t quite right, or where the colour mix isn’t exactly what I was going for.

People often tell me that I should go into business selling my cakes. (There are MANY reasons why I would never do this – first off the amount of time that goes into making them is obscene, my hourly rate would be peanuts, secondly ingredients here in NZ are expensive, third I don’t have a commercial grade kitchen, four – I just don’t want to!)

The biggest reason that I won’t though, is that I don’t think that that they are good enough to charge what I would need to charge in order to make a cake business viable.

Time to be FLAWSOME

And for a long time, I took the same approach in my main business too.

I didn’t think I was the BEST coach, or I was not as good as the other coaches who, on the face of it, were doing SO much better than me.

But here’s the thing – all I saw about the other coaches was what you see in my cakes, not what I see in them. All I saw in my coaching business were my perceived flaws. And the more coaches that I talk to (and I talk to coaches day in, day out, believe me!) the more I realised that we are ALL dealing with our own insecurities and flaws.

The difference is in those who are willing to do what is necessary, no matter how uncomfortable, to get what they want.

Because we don’t see your flaws, we see your FLAWSOMENESS!!

Wanna be FLAWESOME with me? Tell me more in the comments below.

And to find out more about working with Lorraine on a one-to-one basis, please click below.

Connect

What would you do if you couldn’t fail?

Well, fear of failure is a very common feeling that I work on with clients but what you might not know is that fear of success is something equally as prevalent. Just as often I’ll be talking to people who are blocking their success, as those who are blocking their failure.

Either way I want to give you a couple of ideas on how you could address one, other or both.

So fear of failure or fear of success is just a fear of the unknown.

It’s a fear of what will happen if…

What will happen if I fail?

What will happen if I succeed?

The Pre-mortem

A useful tool is what I call the pre-mortem. We know what a post mortem is, that’s when we dissect everything that happened and maybe see if there are things that we can change for the future.

But a useful tool is a pre-mortem.

So what might happen?

What might happen if I fail?

What might happen if I succeed?

Now, aside from the fact that I don’t really subscribe to the idea of failure, I believe that there is no failure only feedback.

What feedback would we get if things didn’t go the way that we had hoped?

What could possibly happen?

And just as we did 50 reasons why for the Comparisonitis Blog (so if you haven’t read that go back and have a look at that one) let’s try and list as many things that could happen if things didn’t go according to plan. Because once we know, then we can do something about it. Then we can put contingencies in place.

When it’s stuck in our heads all we do is worry and I quite often say that worry is an indulgence. It’s just an energy drain. It doesn’t actually do anything to help us deal with the problem in front of us. Now there are some arguments against that, that’s fine, but for the purposes of this exercise, I want you to get that worry out onto paper and write as many reasons, as many things as you can think of, about what will happen if you fail.

And if your fear is of success, then do the same thing. You know, what will happen if you are successful? It may mean taking you away from your family. It may mean being more visible. It may mean leaving the work that you’re currently doing and moving into a different role.

So get all of these reasons, these possible outcomes down on paper because then you can start to devise contingencies and say, well if this happens then I will do X.

It’s very simple once you have the the possible outcomes on paper.

4 Questions to help

If that’s not your jam then there’s another tool that I use and it’s four questions. Just four simple questions that help you get unstuck.

If you are trying to do something and you have a fear of failure or trying to do something and you suspect you might have a fear of success and it’s keeping you stuck then I want you to work through these four questions:

#1 – What will happen if you do?

What will happen if you do the thing? Well I might fail and that means A, B and C. Or I might succeed and that means X, Y and Z.

#2 – What will happen if you don’t?

If you don’t do the action, if you don’t give it a shot, what is going to happen? Well, things are probably going to stay the same, or there might be some other changes.

#3 – What won’t happen if you do?

If you embark on the goal, what’s not going to happen?

#4 – What won’t happen if you don’t do the thing?

What might you miss out on, or what is the benefit if you don’t?

And these are often just enough to get my clients unstuck. Give them a go and let me know how you get on.

And to find out more about working with Lorraine on a one-to-one basis, please click below.

Connect

Do you ever suffer from Comparisonitis?

You know, when you just can’t help but look around and see other people who you perceive to be doing things bigger and better than you could ever do? And then you start comparing yourself to them and generally you are the one that always comes off worst, right?

Yeah, I’ve had some experience with that too.

Most of us do it.

Whether it is walking into a party and comparing yourself to everybody that’s in the room at the party.

Or whether it’s when you are trying to achieve a goal and you look around and think, well everyone else is doing so much better than I am.

Or maybe you are in business or trying to get a promotion and just feel like everybody else seems to have it nailed and you don’t.

Let me ask you this, is that useful?

Hopefully you said no.

Comparisonitis is not useful and intellectually we know that it’s not useful. But that doesn’t stop us doing it, it doesn’t stop us looking around.

How do we get back on track?

How do we stop looking around and get laser focused on what it is that we are trying to achieve again?

Here’s a couple of simple things that you can use when you are trying to get yourself back on track.

50 Reasons Why?

First of all, reconnect to your reasons for why you are doing what you are doing in the first place. When we set goals, generally I encourage clients to understand really why they want the goal in the first place.

Even writing 50 reasons why.

I recently undertook a program which was goal related and that was one of the exercises, write 50 reasons why you want to achieve this goal.

And it can seem a little bit overkill at the time because you are all fired up and you are like,

“yeah I’m really going to do this, I’m going to do this and I’m so excited about it, it’s going to be awesome.“

Why do I need to write 50 reasons why I want to do it?

Well, it’s exactly for that moment when you’re diverted, you’re taken off-track. When you can come back and look at the reasons why you are trying to achieve this goal, sometimes that can be enough to get you back on track and keep you focused.

There is a reason why large organisations and companies spend so much money building their mission statement and their vision statement and having these lofty goals. It’s because it works!

OK, so that’s number 1.

List your reasons why.

You are 100% unique

Then get really clear on why you are embarking on the goal first and foremost. And remember just how unique your goals, values and reasons for doing what you’re doing are.

Now if you haven’t had an experience of uncovering your core values then check out my Cultivating Confidence blog because that walks you through the process that I use with my clients to get to a very deep level of their core values.

Everybody is running their own race

There is so many cliches and bumper stickers that say the same thing.

“Don’t compare yourself to one person’s showreel”.

“Don’t compare your beginning to their middle or their end.”

That’s all great advice, as long as it’s meaningful to you.

And I think that’s the piece that is missing.

Bring that meaning back into what you are trying to do. Your reasons, your drivers, are different to everybody else, because you are unique and what makes you, YOU, no one else can replicate.

Think about that when you start looking sideways, remember that everybody has their own story, everybody is unique. What they are trying to do is possibly for a different reason than you. Because they will have their 50 reasons and you have got your 50 reasons. And there might be some overlap but it’s unlikely that you have got the same 50 reasons.

Get laser focused

When you are coming back on track and you need to pull yourself back in to get laser focused on what you are trying to achieve, remember why you are trying to do it and the fact that you are 100% unique.

I hope this has been helpful. Please let me know in the comments.

And to find out more about working with Lorraine on a one-to-one basis, please click below.

If you are ready to kick into Cultivating Confidence Part 2 it means that you have gone through the process that results in you having your core values words and the definitions of those words.The definitions of your value words will give you an idea of what’s most important to you and and who you feel you are.

Your definitions are the pinnacle of what that value word means to you. What I mean by that is that if you were living that value 100% in your life, it was showing up 100% in your life, then that’s the definition that you’ve written.

Living your values 100%

What I want you to think about next in Cultivating Confidence is to imagine yourself already living your values 100%. If you were all of those things all of the time, which I know is not necessarily an accurate suggestion, but I want you to imagine that. So if you are all of those things all of the time, what would be different?

Visualize yourself – what do you see?

If you could visualize yourself being all of those things that are most important to you right now, what do you notice about that version of you?

How are they standing?

How are they holding themselves?

Are they speaking?

Are they listening?

Are they with people?

Or alone?

Where are they?

What are they saying?

Who are they speaking to?

What can you notice about that version of you that is a representation of your definition of your core values?

Change your body language, improve your confidence

Once you’ve got that very clear picture of how they’re holding themselves, adopt that body language that you see in your mind’s eye. Body language is really important because the way that you hold yourself helps you access different types of memories and feelings.

Do you feel different now?

Do you feel more confident?

When you change your body position, it changes the thoughts that you access in your mind. If you’re not feeling very confident then it’s quite often that your shoulders will fall and your head or your eye position will come down. When we adopt shoulders back, head up, (sometimes it’s called a power position) it’s about adopting that confident body language which actually accesses different feelings in your your body and different memories and images in your mind.

I want you to play with that. I want you to take your definitions, turn them into a visualization of some form of role model to help you step into that, and experience what it feels like to be that version of you, that confident version of you and then act as if that is who you are.

Retraining your unconscious mind

What we’re doing is retraining your unconscious mind to feel a certain way and to access certain memories and certain feelings. This is really interesting stuff. It’s all been proven with neuroscience but I’m just scraping the surface for you and I’m inviting you to play with it and try it.

If you need to feel a bit more confident in your life then this is “essentially fake it till you make it” but if you don’t subscribe to that term then still give this a go because it’s really true.

Change your body language. Be in that positive physical position. It will change the way that you think and feel. If you want to feel more confident then give it a go.

Let me know how you get on.

And to find out more about working with Lorraine on a one-to-one basis, please click below.